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NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Rating: 
UK. 1984.
Director/Screenplay – Michael Radford, Based on the Novel by George Orwell, Producer – Simon Perry, Photography – Roger Deakins, Music – The Eurythmics & Dominic Muldowney, Special Effects – Ian Scoones, Production Design – Allan Cameron. Production Company – Umbrella-Rosenblum.
Cast:
John Hurt (Winston Smith), Richard Burton (O’Brien), Suzanna Hamilton (Julia), Cyril Cusack (Charrington), Gregor Fisher (Parsons)
Plot: Oceania, formerly Britain, is at war with the continents of Eurasia and Eastasia. Winston Smith is a clerk at the Ministry of Truth whose job is to rewrite newspaper headlines to change the past and provide a more positive image of the government. Winston buys a diary and starts to write in a corner in his apartment where he is hidden from the omnipresent television screens that monitor the entire populace. He is drawn into a forbidden sexual liaison with Julia, a co-worker from the Ministry. But they are discovered and he is arrested and taken to be tortured, broken and made into a good citizen again.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a literary classic – not just an sf classic, but one that has become set texts in various English literature classes. In terms of sf it is the single most influential Dystopian work, with dozens of books and films having borrowed the imagery of Orwell’s malevolently omnipresent totalitarian state and its breaking of the individual’s spirit. There are no more potent and savage a series of indictments of the anonymous machinery of totalitarian power than the images that Orwell emphasizes – of the future of the omniscient state as a boot stamping into the face of humanity forever, or of O’Brien holding his fingers up before Winston to ask how many he sees – “Four” “And if the state says three fingers, how many do you see?” Terms like Newspeak and Big Brother have gone on into general recognition – most recently it even became the name of a reality tv series Big Brother (2001– ) wherein contestants are placed in a house wired with tv cameras – and phrases like ‘Orwellian’ or a ‘1984 scenario’ are frequently used to suggest a totalitarian nightmare.
Orwell was in reality Eric Blair (1903-50). Blair came from a lower middle-class British family – his father was a civil servant who worked in the Opium Department in India. Blair for a time joined the Indian Imperial Police and then went to fight for the socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. But it was back in England that he found his calling as a writer, with non– and semi-fictional works such as Down and Out in London and Paris (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Throughout all of Blair/Orwell’s work is a strong feeling of empathy for the poor and working classes and a desire to act as moral voice and tell their story. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was Orwell’s last and greatest book. He was suffering from tuberculosis when he wrote it, something that casts a grim shadow of suffering over the book, and died a matter of months after it was published.
Prior to this film the book has previously been adapted as a live television play 1984 (1954), scripted by Nigel (The Quatermass Xperiment) Kneale and starring Peter Cushing as Winston. The success of that led to a film adaptation 1984 (1955), directed by Michael (Logan’s Run) Anderson and with Edmond O’Brien as Winston. The film was generally agreed upon as dull. Moreover, while the American release was accurate to the book, the British version was given an appallingly upbeat ending where Winston and Julia die in a hail of machine-gun bullets. The Orwell estate, unhappy with this version, eventually intervened to have it withdrawn from general availability, much to the frustration of film historians like yours truly.
But then in 1980, Michael Radford managed to persuade Orwell’s widow to issue the rights to the book to him, whereupon he mounted this version. Radford was able to bide his time and not only managed to have the film released in 1984, the year of the book, but quite remarkably also managed to shoot it during the very months (April-June) that Orwell stated that the story was taking place.
And the film is one literary adaptation that quits stuns with its vivid, potent intellectual articulation. The overwhelming bleakness of the story and the brilliance of Orwell’s ideas emerge with a breathtaking clarity. Radford imbues the scenes between Winston and Julia with a haunting bathos. The film is so bleak that Radford is able to invest the image of Suzanna Hamilton placing on an old faded dress or that of the two lovers looking down on a housewife hanging out the washing with a haunting nostalgia that makes them representative of all that is fragile and beautiful about human endeavour. Allen Cameron’s production design – all concrete bunkers and bleakly washed-out monochrome-gray sets – is superb. For Orwell, 1984 was merely the year he was writing the book – 1948 – with the last two digits reversed and Radford and Cameron faithfully preserve the milieu. The whole film has been beautifully designed in post-War retrograde – archaic handheld telephones, monochrome tv sets, with the most modern intrusion being a helicopter.
John Hurt is as monochromatic as the surroundings, which is just the way Winston should be. The great and underrated Suzanna Hamilton is fiery and charged, and the love scenes between she and Hurt have an aching emotional nakedness. Richard Burton gives his last ever cinematic performance here and it is simply the best performance of his career, one that was criminally neglected at the major awards that year. His is the capability to present Winston’s soul-breaking with such seductive, logically persuasive nihilism that the famous rat scene from the book is merely an anti-climax.
It is sad that none of Radford’s other films since have demonstrated the power of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His subsequent films include White Mischief (1987), the awards-acclaimed and completely overrated Il Postino (1994), B. Monkey (1998) and Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000).
The only other Orwell book of fantastic nature is Animal Farm (1945), a savage indictment of the ideological failings and hypocrisy of the Russian Revolution written in terms of a talking animals fable. This was disappointingly filmed twice as the animated Animal Farm (1954) and as the live-action Animal Farm (1999).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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